1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to recording a log of an image formation process in an image-forming apparatus, and more particularly to recording the image read in the image formation process.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, enhancing security of information handled within a company, compliance, and protection of personal information are getting more important. For instance, companies are required to disclose business information, like based on what information business has been accomplished, according to the auditing. For this purpose, it is needed to specify what information is processed by whom, as well as when, where, and how the information is processed, by managing access to information in a log.
To strengthen security management of confidential information that is conventionally handled on paper medium, there is a technology of allotting a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) to the medium such as printing paper, and printing the UUID on the medium with a bar code or IC tag, or embedding it in the medium. If this UUID is used, management information concerning the medium may be retrieved to specify a confidential document, including an author who created the confidential document and time of creation.
Equal importance is placed on handling information in the form of images held and managed on paper medium and information stored on computer. Incidentally, there has been proposed a technology of transmitting an image read by an image-forming apparatus such as a copying machine or facsimile apparatus to a separately-provided document management system via a network, and performing document management. Combining the technology of retrievably recording the read image and the UUID would enable the UUID to serve as a key for specifying what document is formed by which copying machine, as well as when and by whom. Accordingly, even in the case where a confidential document has been created illegally or without permission, the author can be specified, by virtue of the ability to specify which copying machine has been used to copy the confidential document, when and by whom. Therefore, auditing may be completed correctly.
However, the above-mentioned technology retains only document images for which the image-forming apparatus has ended the image formation process normally, in order to improve convenience to the user; therefore, document images for which the image formation process ends abnormally and which are only partially formed are not retained for maintenance and management. That is, in the technology, when an image formation process is canceled during the course of copying a confidential document of tens of pages, such a process may provide important information, but the document is not recorded.